Just spotted a rather portentous headline on the BBC technology news site: ‘Symbian dismisses Google Android’.

I know that Google has next to no experience of producing a mobile platform. And I know that Symbian has plenty. But given Google’s track record, I do wonder if Symbian might come to be haunted by that headline in a couple of years’ time. Google just seem to be good at virtually everything they do.

I’ve been even quieter than usual lately because I’ve been on holiday. Just got back the other day – San Francisco is lovely at this time of the year, although I am still feeling the jet lag a bit.

Anyway, I’ll get to the point. I just stumbled upon a new way of booking train tickets in the UK, and if you ask me it’s the best out there. By a mile.

Admittedly, that’s not saying an awful lot. The current train ticketing websites are pretty much universally awful. For the full story, check out my previous post on the subject.

Virgin’s site was the best of a bad bunch, but now GNER’s new ‘mixing desk’ actually delivers a reasonably pleasant experience. It looks to be in some sort of testing phase, but you can use it to book tickets – I just picked up a return to Edinburgh as part of their handy five quid promotion.

Ok, I’d be lying if I said I’d given the site a thorough test, and they still have some design issues to sort out (it doesn’t render properly in Firefox, though my non-standard font size may have something to do with that). But give it a go – it makes it finding the cheapest fares much easier.

A definite step forward, and one that might force the other vendors to up their efforts in a similar fashion. From what I’ve seen so far: good work.

Newsnight are going all-out with election speculation tonight. It’ll be really interesting to see what happens early next week.

Michael Crick’s report was excellent. He went round the major parties’ HQs in Chester. And he filmed it in a very ‘YouTube’ kind of a way. It looked off-the-cuff and genuine, with a hand-held camera, Tory party activists interrupting shots and the Lib Dems struggling to find the light switch.

I’m no expert when it comes to video, and not 100% sure it was genuine, but it looked great to me. Really engaging, and maybe an interesting side effect of this YouTube revolution thingy the mainstream press has been going on about.

You should be able to watch the whole show here, for 24 hours after about 11.30 tonight.